This disclosure relates generally to online advertising, and more specifically to pacing impressions and reach of an online advertisement.
Advertisers may have certain goals when planning a new advertising campaign (“advertising campaign”). For instance, an advertiser may have a goal for the number of times an advertisement is presented to users of an online system (i.e., the number of “impressions” of the advertisement), the number of different online system users presented with an advertisement (i.e., the “reach” of the advertisement), and/or a duration during which the advertisement is presented. Conventionally, an advertiser may specify certain attributes of an advertising campaign or advertisements in an advertising campaign when specifying the advertising campaign. For example, an advertiser may identify targeting criteria associated with one or more advertisements in an advertising campaign and bid amounts associated with various advertisements in the advertising campaign.
Additionally, an advertiser may specify a time limit for the advertising campaign. The time limit stops the presentation of advertisements in the advertising campaign after the time limit expires, even if the budget of the advertising campaign has not been exhausted. Hence, the advertising campaign may be presented to users either until the budget is exhausted or the time limit expires. Particularly for advertising campaigns with low budgets, advertisements from the advertising campaigns may cease to be presented to users of an online system before the time limit of the advertising campaign have expired.
However, advertising campaigns may benefit from pacing the presentation of the ad to users over the time limit associated with the advertising campaign to allow advertisements from the advertising campaign to be presented to users for the duration of the time limit. Because conventional methods for advertisement selection identify advertisements from an advertising campaign eligible for presentation to an online system user and determine whether to present the identified advertisements to users fluctuations in the number of online system users eligible to be presented with advertisements in the advertising campaign may affect how rapidly a budget of the advertising campaign is exhausted. As the number of users eligible to be presented with advertisements from an advertising campaign is difficult to predict before the advertisements are selected for presentation and the amount an advertiser is willing to pay for presentation of advertisements in the advertising campaign may vary over time, conventional methods for advertisement selection limit an advertiser's ability to regulate presentation of advertisements from an advertising campaign throughout a time interval.